When you downvote, explain why

post by KvmanThinking (avery-liu) · 2025-02-07T01:03:44.097Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

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Being a newcomer and having your post downvoted can be very discouraging. This isn't necessarily a bad thing—obviously we want to discourage people from posting things that are not worth our time to read—but it doesn't provide much feedback other than "something about this post/comment/question/answer makes it undesirable to have on LessWrong". So here's my idea:

If you downvote something that isn't obvious spam, you should comment the reason why. This will nudge the newcomer in the direction of "people don't like this particular quality of my post/comment/question/answer" rather than "people don't like my post/comment/question/answer." So as to avoid flooding bad content with comments, simply upvote any comment that states a reason for the undesirability of the post/comment/question/answer instead. Hopefully this helps the newcomer get feedback about what they should change, rather than just blindly guessing.

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comment by Seth Herd · 2025-02-07T05:13:38.093Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree.

I often write an explanation of why new members' posts have been downvoted below zero, when the people that downvoted them didn't bother. Downvoting below zero with no explanation seems really un-welcoming. I realize it's a walled garden, but I feel like telling newcomers what they need to do to be welcomed is only the decent thing to do.